22 December 2019

The Slow Sovietization of the West

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)




The circular firing squad has finally come for leftist cultural icon J.K. Rowling. Her tweet heard round the world:



Sex is not real, it would appear, to a large number of the twitterati, who promptly dogpiled Ms. Rowling whilst lamenting their now-ruined childhoods:



To understand how such a surreal sequence of events can in fact be unfolding, we offer this piece of research from a few years back. We hope you find it illuminating.



[Re-post, original post here.]





We have seen how the free press in a liberal democracy can spout the reigning dogma in ways that call to mind the old Pravda or Izvestya.

The parallels do not end there.  Many Westerners today have the growing sense their children's schools as well as pop culture are becoming propaganda fountains, and that questioning the orthodoxy entails real risk.  Are we mad to make such comparisons?  To orient ourselves, it can be helpful to look back at examples of overt scholarly and artistic indoctrination in the U.S.S.R.  How near are we to them? How did we get here? What comes next?




1) From the time a child can toddle



W.H. Chamberlin in 1934:
From the time when a child can toddle, a red flag is pushed into its hand; it learns the new Soviet songs and is taught in nursery and kindergarten to lisp Soviet slogans. The stream of propaganda, all directed to the purpose of making a new type of man and woman, entirely devoted to Soviet and Communist ideas, becomes intensified as the child grows older.  
No one can visit a Soviet school without being impressed by the thorough manner in which the pupils are taught to hate "capitalism" and the "bourgeoisie" and to regard the Soviet system as the best in the world.  (1) 

In today's West, Great Britain has led the charge in punishing Wrongthink in its youth:
The mother of a seven-year-old boy was told to sign a school form admitting he was racist after he asked another pupil about the colour of his skin.  Elliott Dearlove had asked a five-year-old boy in the playground whether he was ‘brown because he was from Africa.’

‘I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation,’ she said.  ‘I refused to sign it.' ... '[Elliott] kept saying to me, “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty” and he was extremely distressed by it all.’ (See also Yorkshire Post and Huffington Post.)



Lest one think this is just one school that has gone off the rails:
More than 20,000 pupils aged 11 or younger were last year put on record for so-called hate crimes such as using the word ‘gaylord’.  Some of them are even from nursery schools where children are no older than three.

One youngster was accused of being racist for calling a boy ‘broccoli head’ and another was said to be homophobic for telling a teacher ‘this work is gay’. Two primary school children were reported for homophobia after quarrelling over a rubber [eraser] and calling each other ‘gay’  and ‘lesbian’.

...if schools are asked for a pupil reference by a future employer or a university, the record could be used as the basis for it, meaning the pettiest of incidents has the potential to blight a child for life.


U.S. schools are also jumping on the bandwagon:
Verenice Gutierrez picks up on the subtle language of racism every day. Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year. 
“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at [Portland's] Harvey Scott K-8 School... “Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.
    ...Last Wednesday, the first day of the school year for staff, for example, the first item of business for teachers at Scott School was to have a Courageous Conversation — to examine a news article and discuss the “white privilege” it conveys.


As are Sweden's:
Last fall, 200 teachers attended a major government-sponsored conference discussing how to avoid "traditional gender patterns" in schools. ...The teachers try to expose the pupils to as few "gendered expressions" as possible. ... When pupils play house, they are encouraged to include "mommy, daddy, child" in their imaginary families, as well as "daddy, daddy, child"; "mommy, mommy, child"; "daddy, daddy, sister, aunty, child"; or any other modern combination.


 One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying."


Experts say things haven't gone far enough:
Children should be provided with paper other than white to draw on and paints and crayons should come in "the full range of flesh tones", reflecting the diversity of the human race, according to the former teacher.

Finally, staff should be prepared to be economical with the truth when asked by pupils what their favourite colour is and, in the interests of good race relations, answer "black" or "brown".

The measures, outlined in a series of guides in Nursery World magazine, are aimed at avoiding racial bias in toddlers as young as two.  According to the guides, very young children may begin to express negative and discriminatory views about skin colour and appearance that nursery staff must help them "unlearn".

And in Sweden at least, those who refuse to subject their children risk persecution by the State:
Sweden is creating new political refugees: the home-schooler.  One of the escape routes for home-schoolers from Sweden is by ship, two hours across the Baltic sea to the Ă…land Islands. It's a part of Finland where the locals speak Swedish and where parents can home school in freedom.

Sweden's home-school movement has been crushed by a state apparatus that wants children as young as one year old in daycare, and all children in a classroom with a state-approved curriculum.

...Himmelstrand and his wife Tamara were threatened with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of fines for home-schooling. The family slipped quietly out of the country and is beginning a new life in Finland. 

'This is a major area of the Communist saturation strategy--that everywhere the Soviet citizen looks, and in everything he reads, he finds nothing but the promotion and glorification of the aims of the party.' 
--William Benton , 1958






2) Propaganda in pop culture



The press and the schools were two ways to fill the Soviet man's head with the right ideas.  Popular culture was a third. W.H. Chamberlin, 1934:
Typical of film propaganda was an unconsciously amusing production which I saw where the heroine, a factory girl, contracts a union with an unworthy, careerist type of Young Communist, who persuades her to leave the factory bench and live with him in the ignoble comfort of domestic ease.
[...] Bit by bit her proletarian conscience began to stir until she finally broke off with her unworthy lover and took her old place at the machine, whereupon the production plan of the factory, which had been lagging, was fulfilled by 106 per cent and the percentage of brak, or damaged goods, miraculously declined from 35 per cent to 4 per cent. (1)


Though it takes different forms, we are no stranger to the transmission of the reigning blank-slatist dogma through pop culture.  Hollywood players have more or less admitted it.


Television, that nightly IV drip into our imaginary collective, has gone out of its way to confuse us as to the nature of racial reality in the U.S.  Nicholas Stix:
For years, Law & Order, which is filmed in Manhattan, advertised its episodes as being “ripped from the headlines,” a claim Wolf and star Jerry Orbach still make in interviews. But instead of depicting reality, Wolf’s scriptwriters take high-profile crimes committed by blacks, and replace the bad guys with whites, and invent white racist monsters that bear no relation to anything seen in New York during the past 100 years.
And so, while according to NYPD crime reports, over 89 percent of suspects in violent crimes are black or Hispanic, L&O presents a looking-glass world in the grips of a white crime wave.

Do read his eye-opening list of some of the more flagrant examples.

A  2004 study at the University of Georgia's Dept. of Criminal Justice confirms it:




We've become numbed to seeing commercials where the burglar is always white, gay couples live the monogamous white picket fence lifestyle, and women fearlessly take charge of their helpless husbands. Paul Kersey of SBPDL has written an entire book, Hollywood in Blackface, on the film industry's improbable depiction of the Afro computer whiz, physicist, doctor, and ever-present 'Numinous Negro.''


Does this barrage of images have any concrete effect?  A Washington Post poll from the 1990s showed that:
Most whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asian Americans [polled] said the black population, which is about 12 percent, was twice that size. 

A majority of white Americans have fundamental misconceptions about the economic circumstances of black Americans, according to a new national survey, with most saying that the average black is faring as well or better than the average white in such specific areas as jobs, education and health care. That’s not true. Government statistics show that whites, on average, earn 60 percent more than blacks, are far more likely to have medical insurance and more than twice as likely to graduate from college.

A recent Gallup poll found that the average American thinks 25% of the population is homosexual. (The actual number is between 2 and 3.5%.)



One is hard-pressed to remember an era in Western history (outside of wartime) where life as presented by the media was so antipodal to reality.  And at a loss to know if it is reaching a crescendo, or just getting started.

 'The most important reason why there was no organized resistance to communism lies deep in the all-inclusiveness and totalitarianism of the Communist state. It had penetrated into all the pores of society and of the personality--into the vision of the scientists, the inspiration of poets and the dreams of lovers.' 
--Milovan Djilas, 1957




3) Fear of committing heresy


Among 'those who can see,' a small number (like the late J. Philippe Rushton) voice their thoughts openly, but the vast majority do not or cannot.

Montenegrin dissident Milovan Djilas:
. . . a citizen in the Communist system lives oppressed by the constant pangs of his conscience, and the fear that he has transgressed.  He is always fearful that he will have to demonstrate that he is not an enemy of socialism, just as in the Middle Ages a man constantly had to show his devotion to the church. . . . In the Communist system, insecurity is the way of life for the individual.  (2)

No better example of this fear can be found today than in Britain, which has embraced multiculturalism with the zeal of a new convert. The recent sex-grooming scandal in Yorkshire is but one example. Networks of Pakistanis pimping out, beating, and killing young teenage native Britons were swept under the rug for fear of vexing 'the community.'  From The Times, via HBD Chick:


...Police went to a house outside which a father was demanding the release of his daughter, who was inside with a group of British Pakistani adults. Officers found the girl, 14, who had been drugged, under a bed. The father and his daughter were arrested for racial harassment and assault respectively.

...One girl, 15, spent days in hospital after a broken bottle was allegedly forced inside her by two young British Pakistani men in a park, causing her to bleed extensively…

...A 13-year-old girl was found at 3am with disrupted clothing in a house with a large group of Asian men who had fed her vodka. A neighbour reported the girl’s screams.Police arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly but did not question the men
The imperative was not saving these girls, but rather proving one was not an 'enemy of socialism multiculturalism':
“[The report] said: ‘There are sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting … this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided.’”

The following incident from 2010 will no doubt be pored over by future historians dissecting the fall of Blighty:
 The 45-year-old IT company manager, who does not want to be named, was arrested in front of his wife and young son, was fingerprinted and had his DNA taken.

It came after staff at Rother District Council in East Sussex declared the phrase “It’s the “do as you likey” attitude that I am against” – sent in an email to their planning department – was potentially racist because “likey” rhymes with the derogatory word [for Gypsy] “pikey”.

The businessman was held in a cell for four hours until officers established he had nothing to do with the email, which had been sent by one of his then workers, Paul Osmond, from a company computer.

As will this one:

A pub singer is set to be quizzed by cops tonight after he was accused of "racism" for belting out the chart hit Kung Fu Fighting as two Chinese people walked past.
Simon Ledger was arrested in a Chinese restaurant after a complaint was made to police. The singer is set to be interviewed by cops at 8pm tonight after his bail comes to an end.

Cops sprang into action and arrested Simon despite the fact that he regularly features the 1974 Number 1 in his act at a seaside pub.

What doctrine demands we punish our own brethren for any imagined slight while leaving the aliens among us at liberty to commit the most heinous crimes?


'...the leaders have made virtues of self-abasement, cowardice, hypocrisy, lack of principle, and lies . . .'
--Imre Nagy, 1956



4) The purge and the blacklist



Chamberlin quotes a Soviet playwright from the 1930s:
"The Communist fears that he will be accused of heresy or disloyalty. The Soviet employee fears the 'chistka,' or purge, that may blacklist him. The engineer fears an accusation of sabotage. The peasant woman fears that she may be called a kulak and have her property confiscated." (1)

The chistka, or purge, in the modern West? A bit over-the-top, no?



As it happens, the consequences of Wrongthink can indeed include loss of employment, as we've seen from the travails of Rick Sanchez at CNN, Juan Williams at PBS, Larry Summers at Harvard, John Derbyshire at the National Review, or Pat Buchanan at MSNBC (victim groups offended, respectively: Jews, Muslims, women, Afros, non-Whites).


Being fired from a private company is one thing; being prosecuted or imprisoned is quite another.  We in the U.S. are among the last Western peoples to cling to genuinely free speech.  Not so our Euro brethren:


In 2010 French pundit Eric Zemmour was hauled before the Paris Procureur GĂ©nĂ©ral for stating the following:
"French immigrants are more closely monitored than others because most drug dealers are blacks or Arabs... It's a fact."

It is indeed a fact. This fact was considered 'incitation to racial hatred' and cost Mr Zemmour 2000€, but not his job. (Thanks, some say, to his own group membership.)

But Mr Zemmour is only the tip of a large iceberg:

Multicult dissidents: Those investigated and/or prosecuted for crimethink in the West include  French pundit Eric Zemmour,  Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard ,  Austrian anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff,  Danish MP Jesper Langballe,  the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci,  French author Michel Houellebecq,  Finnish MP Jussi Kristian Halla-aho,  Austrian MP Susanne Winter,  the late Canadian psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton,  Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

From an American perspective, their stories can beggar belief:
In Denmark, Jesper Langballe, a Danish politician and Member of Parliament, was found guilty of hate speech in December 2010 for saying that honor killings and sexual abuse take place in Muslim families.

Langballe was denied the opportunity to prove his assertions because under Danish law it is immaterial whether a statement is true or false. All that is needed for a conviction is for someone to feel offended. Langballe was summarily sentenced to pay a fine of 5,000 Danish Kroner ($850) or spend ten days in jail.

[...] In Italy in May 2005, the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy (UCOII), a group that is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, filed a lawsuit against journalist Oriana Fallaci, charging that "some of the things she said in her book 'The Force of Reason' are offensive to Islam." An Italian judge ordered Fallaci to stand trial in Bergamo on charges of "defaming Islam." Fallaci died of cancer in September 2006, just months after the start of her trial.

[...] In The Netherlands, Gregorius Nekschot, the pseudonym of a Dutch cartoonist who is a vocal critic of Islamic female circumcision and often mocks Dutch multiculturalism, was arrested at his home in Amsterdam in May 2008 for drawing cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims. Nekschot was released after 30 hours of interrogation by Dutch law enforcement officials.

...In an interview with the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, Nekschot said it was the first time in 800 years in the history of satire in the Netherlands that an artist was put in jail. Although the case against Nekschot was dismissed in September 2010, he ended his career as a cartoonist on December 31, 2011.

'What sort of political morality is there in a public life where contrary opinions are not only suppressed but punished with actual deprivation of livelihood; where those who express contrary opinions are expelled from society ?'

--Imre Nagy, 1956


     Wrongthink even extends to expressing opinions about history of which the ruling class does not approve, as witnessed by the slew of 'holocaust deniers' imprisoned in AustriaGermanyFranceAustralia, and Hungary.

Imprisoned for crimethought related to WWII: Austrian Gerd Hosnik, German Gerhard Ittner, Frenchman Vincent Reynouard, Australian Fredrick Toben, Brit David Irving.


'So long as the Soviet Union remains a theological society, based on the principle of infallibility, it will not permit the circulation of Western skepticism and heresy--and it will remain proud in its prohibition. . .' 
--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 1962





5) True believers

For those unmoved by its charms, indoctrination is a bad joke one must pretend to believe in order to survive. But yesterday as today, there were true believers. Chamberlin:
Again and again I have found Young Communists in student dormitories, in workers' barracks, in communes, living under conditions which seemed to an outsider extremely difficult, who were entirely convinced that their system was the best in the world, and that its physical hardships would be quickly overcome.

The political stability of the Soviet rĂ©gime during a period when sacrifices almost unprecedented in any country in peace time were being required of the population must be attributed not only to a machinery of repression which in many ways exceeds that of the Tsars in ruthlessness, but also to the fact that it has won a host of loyal supporters who are on fire with zeal for Communism as a new faith.  (1)

Many of us have seen the type: Like Indian villagers who resign themselves to the occasional tiger attack, one sees diversity-loving young urbanites who've been victims of black street crime but believe it's a normal part of the city landscape--the price to pay for the benefits of diversity.  The zeal can be so strong that, as in the Soviet example, 'conditions which seem to an outsider extremely difficult' are happily accepted, even held out as further proof of the doctrine's truth. To wit:

Amy Biehl, a young white crusader to end apartheid in South Africa, was beaten to death by a mob of Blacks in Cape Town who'd mistaken her for a Boer:


Amy’s father, demonstrating how thoroughly he shared his daughter’s anti-racialist convictions, shook hands with her murderers and encouraged their release. Peter Biehl told reporters: “We hope they will receive the support necessary to live productive lives in a non-violent atmosphere. In fact, we hope the spirits of Amy and of those like her will be a force in their new lives.”

Or the zealous Amanda Kijera, aid worker in Haiti unable to understand her rape by a Haitian as anything other than the fault of The White Man:


I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar.

...Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but their anger is misdirected.  Women are not the source of their oppression; oppressive policies and the as-yet unaddressed white patriarchy which still dominates the global stage are.

We also have pundits such as Salon's Alex Pareene who, despite the fact that he's admittedly been assaulted numerous times by Black persons unknown to him, continues to pen with the utmost sincerity articles such as the following




'One of the most important instruments of informal control developed in the Soviet Union is known as samokritika, which is translated as self- or auto-criticism .... In the Soviet Union this public criticism has been formalized and elaborated into a major social institution.' 
--Alex Inkeles, 1950


6) The art of dissociation



Then as now, man's immense ability to dissociate his beliefs and his actions is a testament to the flexibility of the human mind. Wolfgang Leonhard, the son of German Communist officials:
My mother had been arrested, I had witnessed the arrest of my teachers and friends, and it goes without saying that I had long since realized that reality in the Soviet Union was completely different from the picture presented in Pravda. But somehow I dissociated these things, and even my personal impressions and experiences, from my fundamental political conviction. (2) 

It has been noted that the actions of fervent multiculturalists often do not match their words. A dissociation similar to the Soviet one seems to be taking place:




Anti-racism activist Tim Wise (author of 'White Like Me'), for example, has made a living lecturing on the joys of diversity and the danger posed by Euro-Americans.  His census tract in Nashville, one would imagine, is filled with the many-colored objects of his affection...




...but it is in fact 97% white.

Stupid White Men author Michael Moore is one of Flint's famous native sons.  When Moore was born there, the Euro population was 91.4%. Since then, this number has fallen to 35.7%.  Mysteriously, Moore has since chosen to forsake his vibrant, diverse hometown for Traverse City, stupid white population...


...93.3%.  (His beloved Afros? Only 0.7%.) 

We are confronted with this psychological dissociation again and again, from diversity-lovers who pull their children from schools that become too colored (be it in NorwayAustralia, or the U.S.), to Blacks who moan about segregation in one breath and in the next give each other tips on how to avoid black movie theatres.


 'It was almost as if there were two separate levels--one of everyday events and experiences, which I found myself often criticising; the other that of the great Party line which at this time, despite many hesitations, I still regarded as correct, from the standpoint of general principle.'
--Wolfgang Leonhard, 1958


*     *     *

In our schools, in our pop culture, just as in the press or in the workplace, we are like the frog in the boiling water--complacence has drawn us into kafkaesque absurdities our ancestors would find hard to believe.  There is blame to go around: our genetic legacy of pathological altruism; the influence of a hostile, rootless elite; the problems of scale inherent in an urbanized high-tech society.

In 1960, Hadley Cantril wrote:
The danger facing Soviet leadership is not an imminent revolt to destroy the system, but rather a passive and apathetic attitude of its citizens toward it. The revolutionary Ă©lan has largely disappeared and may almost completely evaporate before long...(2)

And so it did, a generation later, with hardly a whimper.  If the Western multicult emperor truly has no clothes, the question today is, who will be the child that points it out in front of God and everybody?  How much longer can this possibly last? Education, immigration, and employment policy will not regain sanity until somehow, the dam finally breaks.


  


Previously:

REFERENCES:
(1) Chamberlin, William Henry, Russia's Iron Age. Boston: Little, Brown, 1934.
(2) Cantril, Hadley, Soviet Leaders and Mastery over Man. New Brunswick, Rutgers U. Press, 1960.
(3) Benton, William, The Benton Reports of 1956-1958 on the Nature of the Soviet Threat. NY: Associated College Presses, 1958.
(4) Inkeles, Alex, Public Opinion in Soviet Russia:A Study in Mass Persuasion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950
(5) Christensen, Reo M. and McWilliams, Robert O., Voice of the People:Readings in Public Opinion and Propaganda. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1962.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

@ThoseWhoCanSee, I just wanted to say that I admire your hard work, your effort, and your Due Diligence with this blog post. I have been a reader for a number of years. And I just wanted to let you know that I and many others appreciate all of your work. Thank You ! Especially in these times of doxing and pure leftist hatred towards everyone else. They say facts are now “ R A C I S T “ . And I’m glad to see that you won’t bow down to petty leftist shaming.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You and yours.
And also to all of our fellow readers out there. We must stand up to these lefty goons.

Andrea Daley Utronebel said...

This is actually closer to the truth.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/TOnAYoN-crs/

M.G. said...

Anon--

Thank you for your lovely comment! It means a lot.

I also wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Keep your chin up, and "don't let the bastards grind you down!"

Obie said...

Much work went into that article. Well done.

On the subject of the abominable Michael Moore's penchant for dwelling in places that don't reflect his love of diversity, this, as you would well know, is common behavior in loudmouthed celebrity leftists. I wish Ricky Gervais had touched on this glaring form of hypocrisy in his Golden Globes' opening monologue.

Hail said...

Reading this post, originally published in Oct. 2012, a pretty big post-script presents itself, one worth recording in a comment:

"If the Western multicult emperor truly has no clothes, the question today is, who will be the child that points it out in front of God and everybody?"

Trump. It was Trump. It was the whole MAGA campaign (or Nationalist-MAGA, as I think it should be called, to differentiate it from whatever it is today that claims the name), but if we want to identity a "child who declares the Emperor has no clothes," it was Trump himself.

I remember 2012. It would have been a wild proposition at the time to say that within three short years, frivolous reality-TV celebrity Donald Trump would be the one, but we all just saw it happen.

"How much longer can this possibly last?."

This, unfortunately, is a different question.

I was thinking about the meaning of the 2010s for the West and I cannot escape the conclusion that it is the decade defined by the breaching of the cordon-sanitaire, the widespread success of ethnonationalist-like movements for the first time (certainly including Nationalist-MAGA at its peak). There is going to be a time lag before sanity fully returns.

I look forward to consolidation of gains in the 2020s.

https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2019/12/30/reflections-on-the-2010s-political/

Anonymous said...

"Nationalist-MAGA was partly a reaction against the early-2010s, Obama-era, media-directed campaign to do all possible to promote nonwhite grievance against White-Christian Middle America (often via the proxy of the police), a phenomenon recorded in these pages in the 2011–2015 period. The second act of that drama was Nationalist-MAGA."

The reality is that Trump has branded "Nationalist-MAGA" not because he actually believes in its tenets, but because it caters to a particular group that will support him through thick and thin. Meanwhile, he enriches himself and his Jewish/Saudi/UAE buddies at the expense of his advocates, who continue to foolishly believe that he is on their side, by marketing his brand of politics.

Tomasz P. Szynalski said...

Is your only source for the Elliott Dearlove story the Daily Mail article? Because I know for a fact that the Daily Mail routinely MAKES UP stories. And by "makes up", I don't mean "misreports" or "distorts" -- I mean "makes up out of thin air". For example, some time ago they wrote a story about a woman dentist (from my city) who got so angry at her fiancee that she pulled all his teeth. Turned out there is no dentist by that name in the city (I checked the official register), and no local media had reported this alleged incident. When pressed by the local media, the Daily Mail admitted (with some weasel language) that the story was not in fact true. So if you care about the truth, and not just generating right-wing outrage, I recommend that you stop using tabloids as references in your arguments.

M.G. said...

Hail—

How nice to see you here.

…if we want to identity a "child who declares the Emperor has no clothes," it was Trump himself.

Indeed, Trump has managed to gore the oxen of so many in so little time.

I almost think that his straight talk explains his popularity more than anything else. No policy on trade or taxes or immigration quite touches people like a well-timed barb aimed at the PC brigade. It hits people viscerally. That's also largely why I think he's going to win this year.

…the widespread success of ethnonationalist-like movements for the first time (certainly including Nationalist-MAGA at its peak). There is going to be a time lag before sanity fully returns.

Yes I agree, the nationalist backlash has now swept from the U.S. to the U.K. to France, Italy, Hungary, all the way to Brazil… the tide is definitely turning. We've come a long way in eight little years.

M.G. said...

Tomasz P. Szynalski—

You're right, I should have included a more reliable news source. Local papers the Yorkshire Post and the Hull Daily Mail (via Huffington Post U.K.) have done original reporting on this story, including interviewing those concerned. I've now added those links to the post.

Tomasz P. Szynalski said...

Thanks for providing better sources for the Elliott Dearlove story. I note that nothing much seems to have come out of the "investigation", thankfully. I'm not sure who was to blame (the procedures? the teacher who decided they had to report it?), but I don't disagree with your view that a culture of extreme sensitivity to racism is part of the explanation.

Sorry for harping on the same thing, but the Daily Mail is still your source for "More than 20,000 pupils aged 11 or younger were last year put on record for so-called hate crimes"...